We’re pleased to announce the winners of this year’s print contests: the Montana Prize in Fiction, Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry! Thank you to everyone who submitted. We received an unprecedented number of submissions, and were impressed and excited by the power of the submitted work. It was a pleasure reading your writing. The winners will each receive a $500 prize and publication in CutBank 75, out summer 2011. Additionally, several finalists will also be published in the 75th issue. Montana Prize in Fiction – judged by Eileen Myles
Winner: Anne Ray, Novio, Novia
Eileen Myles writes, “I first admired this story because it felt enormously readable. I felt teased forward as a reader. In its way it's very inward, this story, so though it is taking place in “the world” there was a peephole experience about it so that you felt like you were looking out from the inside in a very graphic way. There’s lots of details but they are never heavy. It’s almost murmured in a way. I knew enough about the narrator but mostly I knew about how the narrator felt about herself. Not so good but still registering things on an exact level like how a moment of successful dancing though quickly abandoned did indeed go to one’s hips in relation to the music and the man you were dancing with and everything else in the world and the writing delivered a sensation that life on almost more a micro level than a macro one is persistently shocking.”
Finalists:
Kim van Alkemade, “His Amy Hours”
Matthew Burnside, “Six Rules to Win the Game”
Sara Leitenberger, “Emergency Donkey: A Travelogue”
Nicole Louise Reid, “A Purposeful Violence”
Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction – judged by Thalia Field
Winner: Ryan Flanagan, “Wolf Man”
Thalia Field writes, “this excerpt from a longer work uses language in a way which continually surprises conventions of memoir -- invested in a pedagogy of the poetry of its subject -- to teach and instruct the reader in things we might not know -- the specific ways we might not know the story, which is a memoir and a lesson being learned. Inviting us into imaginative scenarios dovetailing an addict's hallucinatory exit, this piece allows grace into the cracks.”
Finalists:
Maggie Anderson, “Prolonging the Illusion”
Helen Phillips, “Life Care Center”
Catherine Sharpe, “One Thousand Kittens”
Chris Wiewiora, “Now”
Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry – judged by D. A. Powell
Winner: Wendy Xu, “I am Your Youngest Poet, and Fill Your Bed with Ink”
D. A. Powell writes, “It's a poem that negotiates that middle space between playful and serious; between the mythic self and the private self. Flaming planets, demons, dreams and wolves could easily be the stuff of legend. But in this poem, they are the forces an artist wrestles with in order to ‘push through ink and digit’ and to lay aside the ache of the ‘disconnected telephone’ and ‘the car sitting in the driveway covered in snow.’”
Finalists:
Sara Deniz Akant, “The Kingdom”
Kerin Sulock, “Applied Psychological Strategy: Neurofeedback”
Adam Tavel, “Having Drank Two-Thirds a Bottle of Riesling During Her Office Hours, Professor Adler Lectures on the Venus of Willendorf"
Arianne Zwartjes, “weld, so irretrievable”